Star Trek: Deep Space Nine revisited

Some people I’m going to meet up with again

Now that New Tricks has gone the way of all televisual flesh and I’ve nothing to do on Tuesday nights, I thought I’d pick up a new project.

Let me make it plain: I am not, nor have I ever been a Trekkie. I’m old enough to have seen the original series the first couple of times around, but a growing interest in actual SF in the early Seventies proved fatal to my interest in the series. Try as I might, I couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough to accept that, in the 25th Century, the Universe would be ordered according to the moral values of mid-Fifties, Midwestern America.

The Next Generation entertained me more. I came to it fairly late – I’m sure I only ever saw Denise Crosby in repeats – and I definitely liked Q. But Deep Space Nine was always my favourite, from the swelling, austere theme music, to the mixture of characters, to the fact that it held a running, accumulating story.

This was the one that Gene Roddenbury had nothing to do with, the one that had a fixed base, not a spaceship tearing around the Universe, the one that could develop. With all due respect to Trekkies, I think the first of those points may have played a large part in my preference for this one.

I missed how Deep Space Nine started, and can’t honestly remember when I caught up with it, but for the time I watched it, it was a BBC2 staple in the 6.15pm slot on Tuesday nights, perfect timing for me to get home from work and, before worrying about food, curl up on the couch for another episode.

But I didn’t get to see how it ended either. The arrival of a very-soon-to-be-wife and three step-children, not to mention the initial superimposition of one household of furniture on top of another ended those easy, indulgent evenings of repeat TV for good. A season had not long since ended, the Federation had been forced to evacuate Deep Space Nine, but Sisko promised to come back. When he did, it was without me. I have wondered what happened ever since.

So, what the hell. This is going to be the biggest single project I’ve ever given myself on this blog, and I’m not saying that I’ll manage this every Tuesday night for the three years plus this will take, but I am going to watch/re-watch Deep Space Nine from pilot to finale, and blog it week by week.

2 thoughts on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine revisited”

I am a Trekkie. Or I guess, was might be a better word for it. TOS was the one that got me into it when SciFi Channel had their special edition in the late 90s. And while I watched a good chunk of the final arc of DS9, it wasn’t until the Fall after it ended that I started catching reruns almost from the beginning that cast me in.

Save for the second recent movie and few episodes here and there, it’s been ten years, since I’ve really been into and up on Star Trek. The latter years of the Berman and Braga regime, with Voyager and Enterprise(which I thought had some decent moments minus time traveling crap) and the last two movies the quality overall was nowhere near what it could’ve been.

But likewise I believe DS9 is far and away the best of them. There was an excitement and humor and just an overall well balanced palette to me. By the third season episodes, I knew it was better than TOS and became just blown away when I got to the fourth and fifth season episodes.
TNG for me was sort of in the middle. It was also the last or concurrent with Enterprise, of the series that I got into. So, it always felt overrated quite a bit. Another starship show with done in one episodes. Deep Space Nine went more places without being on a starship….

That pretty much sums up the appeal of DS9 to me. I enjoyed TNG more than TOS since it was far more sophisticated, which at times came over as somewhere between arrogance and superciliousness, but DS9 had a warmth of its own, a very valuable stillness, and it was telling a story that advanced over weeks and years.

I was in the unusual position of really only watching the middle of the show, seeing neither the start nor the finish, so rewatching it now is in part a discovery. Hope you enjoy the journey if you want to follow, and please feel free to correct me on anything I get wrong.